#this might be a haiku

[gncwasteland]

I was honest but

You pulled away without a

Warning - heartbreaker

[eggtrolls]

haiku misinformation: a fact check

there's an post going around about haiku that has a lot of incorrect information about haiku, its terminology, history, etc. I will try to debunk some of the biggest inaccuracies here. everything in quotes is a direct statement from the original post. this is also really, really long.

"Haiku are made of 14 on, which are essentially the equivalent to Japanese syllabic structures, except the nature of how Japanese as a language is constructed versus English means that any given proper haiku could be translated in extremely and intensely different ways, each giving a subtle but distinctly different meaning."

Starting off strong - haiku are (usually) made of 17 on. It's the classic 5-7-5 pattern! 5+7+5=17! [possibly this is a mix-up with wakiku (脇(わき)句(く)) which is another type of Japanese poetry that does use 14 on but who knows.]

Definitions: an on is a phonetic unit, the equivalent to a mora (pl. morae) in English. this concept a) exists in English and b) like on, is related to syllables but distinctly different from them (i.e. ba is one mora but baa with a long vowel is two morae). On can be counted using the number of hiragana (phonetic syllabic characters) when the text is transliterated, so a word like Osaka that has the long O sound (made up of 4 kana) would be 4 morae or 4 on (o-o-sa-ka; おおさか). it's not really a syllabic structure at all, and more importantly has nothing to do with translation. idk where that last part comes from because that's really...not the point here. Yes, any given "proper" haiku could be translated in different ways with a subtle but distinctly different meaning but that's true of just...translation, period. check out Deborah Smith's translation of The Vegetarian by Han Kang for more on that.

Furthermore, haiku were/are not rigidly locked into the 5-7-5 on pattern. That's just not true, which is why I said usually above. Easy example: a 1676 haiku by Matsuo Basho that uses 18-on:

冨士の風や　扇にのせて 江戸��産; ふじのかぜや おうぎにのせて えどみやげ; the wind of Fuji /I've brought on my fan/a gift from Edo <- that first line is 6-on!

2. "The best way I can explain what I mean is that in English a good poem can be defined as a shallow river, whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well."

Not dignifying this with a response. Deeply incorrect and untrue. @bill-blake-fans-anonymous can handle this assertion.

3. "The presence of the kigu. There is a specific series of characters/words which are used to imply a season, and specifically a specific aspect of a season which the haiku revolves around. The creation of a haiku is often done as a meditative practice revolving around the kigu--you're essentially contemplating on this particular natural feature (nearly always the temporal aspect emphasizes either ephemerality or the opposite as well bc Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty begin coming into play) and building an evocative and purposeful point that revolves around it like a hinge. It functions as both ground and anchor."

First (and largest) problem: the word. is. kigo. kigo. It's ki (季; season)-go (語; word) = 季語. Both the English and Japanese language Wikipedia, or a 3-second google search, will tell you this immediately. I have no idea where the term kigu comes from.

Second problem: plenty of haiku, both traditional and contemporary, do not use kigo. these are described as muki (無季; seasonless). Matsuo Basho, the haiku-writing poet non-Japanese people are most likely to know, wrote at least ten seasonless haiku that exist today. Masaoka Shiki, the Meiji-era haiku poet and reformist, wrote hundreds of kigo-free haiku and as an agnostic, tried to separate haiku from Buddhism and focus more on the shasei, the sketches from daily life. you can actually, today, buy what are called saijiki, which are lists of words and terms that refer to specific seasons (in the traditional Japanese calendar, so there are actually a lot of "micro" seasons as well). some saijiki include a whole section of "seasonles" words - here's an article about non-season kigo in a saijiki.

so the claim that English-language haiku are invalid or not "real" haiku because they lack a kigo doesn't hold up, unless you invalidate a whole bunch of Japanese haiku as well. the op also claimed they would categorize a lot of English "haiku" as senryū which is...an opinion. Yes, haiku tend to be focused around nature (more on that below) and senryū tend to be more comedic or about human foibles but...that's it! it's a tendency! it's not a hard and fast rule!

Third problem: the claim that a haiku is as meditative practice revolving around the kigu kigo...yeah, no. the earlier form of haiku, the hokku, were the introductory poems of the longer poetic form, the renga and the hokku gradually became a standalone poetic form known as haiku. the hokku had a lot of purposes and we have a historical record of them going back ~1000 years to Emperor Juntoku where they were declamatory poems tied to events (births, deaths, etc.) or social events (moon-viewing parties) - not really meditative. haiku, if a genre can focus on a single idea, focus on an experience and that can be real or imaginary, direct and personal or neither.

Here's another Basho poem for your consideration:

夏草や 兵どもが 夢の跡 (natsukusa ya tsuwamonodomo ga yume no ato; summer grasses--/traces of dreams/of ancient warriors)

both the dreams and the grasses are those of Basho (contemporary) and of the warriors (ancient); it's about travel, it's about connecting the present to the ancient past, it's not really so much about the summer.

(Fourth, minor problem that I'm not really going to get into: you'd have to take this 'Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty' up with haiku scholar Haruo Shirane but he explicitly says in the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) that "pioneers of English-language haiku [such as D.T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, and the Beats] mistakenly emphasized Zen Buddhism in Japanese haiku".....so.)

4. "The presence of the kireji...it's a concept borderline absent from English because it's an intersection of linguistics and philosophy that doesn't really exist outside of the context of Japanese."

Let's begin with clarification. What is kireji (lit. a 'cutting word')? It's a class of terms in Japanese poetry that can do a few things, depending on the specific kireji and its place in the poem. In the middle of the poem, it can mark a thematic break, a cut in the stream of thought highlighting the parallel(s) between the preceding and following phrases. At the end of the poem, it provides a sense of ending and closure - it helps mark rhythmic division, to say the least, and it is seen as the 'pivot' word.

Two problems with claims above:

a. there are haiku that do not use kireji. For the hat trick, here's a Matsuo Basho haiku from 1689 AD that is kireji-free: 初しぐれ猿も小蓑をほしげ也 (hatsu shigure saru mo komino wo hoshige nari; the first cold shower/even the monkey seems to want/a little coat of straw) <- NB: I love this haiku so much

b. the idea of a kireji, as in a pivot word that provides an inflection point with rhythmic division and structure, exist not just in English poetry but in multiple different types of poetry across time and space! The caesura in Latin and Ancient Greek! The volta in sonnets! Whatever is happening in the third line of the Korean sijo!

final thoughts:

the op included language, which I won't quote here because it was messy and tied into other rbs, about Orientalism and appropriation in English-language haiku, which is definitely a real thing. but this blanket statement ignores that the relationship between haiku and "the West", much like Japan and "the West", was and is not a one-way street. Western writers were influenced by haiku and, in turn, those writers influenced Japanese writers who wrote haiku inspired by these influences - this process has been going on for well over a century. Furthermore, English and Japanese are not the only languages in which haiku are written! Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore was writing haiku in Bengali; other Indian poets were and are writing them in Gujrati and Malayalam, particularly by the poet Ashitha. the Pakistani poet Omer Tarin has written haiku about Hiroshima! The Spanish poet Lorca published haiku in, get this, Spanish, in 1921 and the Mexican poet José Juan Tablada published more in 1922! Italian translations of Yosano Akiko were published in 1919! any discussion of the idea that English/non-Japanese-language haiku aren't really haiku because they don't hold to the "rules" (which Japanese authors have been revising, adapting, critiquing, and/or straight up flouting for centuries) or because English/non-Japanese poetry is "a shallow river whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well" just shows a lack of knowledge around traditions and depths of...well, poetry itself.

my god this is so long.

in summary: this is a complex topic. If anyone would like some actual information about haiku, its history, common themes and forms, or a collection of good poets, the Routledge Global Haiku Reader (2024) and Haiku Before Haiku : From the Renga Masters to Basho (2011) are great references and really accessible in their language! hmu if you're interested and I can send you some pdfs.

[meteorcrab]

Are you constantly thinking about how ume trees are considered to ward off evil spirits (ironic isn't it?), the flower means elegance, dignity and fidelity, and umeboshi, the pickled fruit, is a very popular food in Japan which compliments Sukuna's food/kitchen motif. Ume also symbolizes the arrival of spring and new beginnings

Are you constantly thinking about all of that or are you normal?

[just-flansy-things]

Yeah I beat my meat

My meat James Ensor

Belgium's famous painter

[eustasscapitankid]

Kid

my love and my flame, i'd follow you to the grave watery abyss

more characters:

Bartolomeo

looking up at me big doe eyes; i can't ignore as your fangs sink in

Doflamingo

your love like a cage suffocating, obsessive within it i drown

Corazon

you fall with a smile, to the grave it follows you what's left of my heart

Crocodile

to warm my cold blood my wani, i beg for your love even if it bites

Killer

my love, a killer yes, i have been a sinner father forgive me

Law

think I’m in trouble cause law's brought me to my knees no, I’m not sorry

Zoro

many sleepless nights we find ways to pass the time your lips taste of sake

Mihawk

a fine red wine, spilled blood coats the floor in my room as we chase our high

[mulholland-driver]

I have always felt Like a failed experiment. A throwaway kid.

[definegodliness]

Prompt: poetically describe your penis 😈

Oh, come on!

We were on a good roll, people were being sincere!

Sigh. Tumblr.

[beeing-stuupid]

#43

Being pulled forward

Into the growing expanse

Drowned in lack of space

[xoxobluelock]

Captain and Gardner

He will guard his striker’s bloom

Oliver Aiku

[lazycatlifegoals]

When AI takes over the planet and starts an extermination on humans and the Tumblr haiku bot is the only ai that takes up arms for the human race and leads a resistance, do you think the code phrase we'll have to get used to whispering at another to see if we're both in the resistance is:

"I like your shoelaces"

[moonlight-eternal]

I do recall now, this childlike figure you show, when they traveled here.

I met them in town, saw pokeballs on their belt, and invited them // to come to my gym. They declined and said to me that they could not stop.

Pursued by evil, they said they were to all there. A hostile Faller.

The nerve of this one! Everything they do accuse of me is their own. I wish that I knew just who from Lordran they are. Perhaps nobody. I am a goddess – of course they would know my name. But me, to know them? Any young Undead... but so skilled in illusion, that is rare indeed.

I might have a plan. If I see this one again, a mental alert: a psychic trigger, to force all my attention to focus on them. Coded to the sight, this tiny redhead in black, so when they appear, // I can't look away. I would hope my memory is also preserved. As a trained psychic, I have techniques that should help. If I can use them...

Well, I wish you luck. I will keep recording all that I see around.

Let us trade numbers. For contact in the future. I am curious // about this stranger. And if they do pose a threat, I can help stop them.

A good idea. Two pairs of eyes are better than just one alone. My journey points west toward the city Lumiose, and I should away... once the bread is done. Shall I come to your abode? Perhaps I can help?

Come, yes, but caution: you have no experience. Royal in your home, // and without the need to eat something every day... Let me work the dough.

[salovie]

It’s like the sun whispered to wake you first

and challenged you to beat the light

and break the dawn,

to wake the rest,

to be new warmth,

to bring love

to new depths.

[sunsetsandsunshine]

So I play volleyball for my schools team and like my coach is thinking of making me the libero…

Remind y’all of anyone?

[abed-with-a-knife]

witch turned me into a cat

i was not pete

i had to turn back

[stellaralignment]

Quash hopelessness

Frantic hack better than not

Learn from your mistakes

[ragewrites]

Altered Haiku, Untitled, Lianna Schreiber 05 / 12 / 2022 § Read a book of haiku...the old bug I had for them has once again caught me. Few ways to pass the time are more pleasant.